Dotcom pioneer Low breaks new ground in mobile ad frontier

Stan Beer
Sunday, 22 March 2009 14:27

Opinion and Analysis

According to Low, Australia is a virtual gold mine of community groups that need to keep in touch with their members.

"Nearly everyone carries a mobile phone with them wherever they go these days so the best way community groups can stay in touch with members is through SMS text messages," Low says.

"Sporting associations is just one area, where each individual sport has literally thousands of members and associated families that need to stay in touch with each other to find out details of venues, fixtures and results."

In fact, says Low, many community groups do use SMS to stay in touch with members. However, the cost of SMS is high and a significant drain on the cash strapped budgets of not-for-profit groups that rely on meagre membership funds, donations and fund-raising activities such as raffles.

"What these organisations need is a system that enables them to send SMS messages to their members for free. That's where RedTxt comes in," says Low.

"Our patented technology platform and service enables a community group like say a football association to send SMS messages to their members free of charge. However, each SMS of 160 characters has a space of 100 characters reserved for the message and 60 characters for an ad.

"For advertisers it's great because they know exactly who their target audience is. For the community groups it's great because they no longer have to pay for their messaging, they can actually generate ad revenue, and they get to use a very simple but powerful web-based purpose built message delivery platform. They can also make sure that their members only receive appropriate ads.

"Above all, however, for community group members it's great because they only get a small text ad attached to the bottom of a message they need to receive anyway. They never get spammed with unsolicited advertising.

"What's more, to opt-in to a message group they only need to dial a number allocated to their group from their mobile phone. To opt-out, they dial the same number. It's a very simple but very powerful system."

Low says that RedTxt has been in high level talks with a number sporting associations, community groups and ad agencies for some time and some major deals are soon to be announced.

"As in the days of FreeOnline where we made the Internet accessible for the general public not just the geeks, we’re making SMS an indispensible communication tool," says Low.

"The days of free community-based SMS have arrived, thanks to RedTxt."

The author holds shares in RedTxt Pty Ltd.